* Posts by Tom_B

16 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2010

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft – A jolly little war for lunchtime

Tom_B

annoying game

I tried it, and as a casual player it's a very annoying game. You'll simply not get cards that make it anywhere near a fair game. I have 3 decks now and I've unlocked all the base cards for a few classes, it's impossible to win against anyone with more cards unlocked. They'll simply have far more powerful cards and your strategy will be meaningless

Unless you're willing to invest a lot of time (or money) into the game it really isn't going to be enjoyable as it's simply never a fair game.

OpenSUSE 12.3: Proof not all Linux PCs are Um Bongo-grade bonkers

Tom_B
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KDE Is beautiful

Having recently decided to have a play with desktop Linux again for the first time in about 5 years, and installed Linux Mint. I must say I'm impressed. I only had to edit xorg.conf once and that was because I was trying to get a windows game working under WINE. Everything just worked.

And KDE. Wow! It really puts the nonsense UI of Windows 8 to shame. I'm hugely impressed with KDE as a desktop these days. Back in the 3.* days it always felt a bit clunky and looked like it was designed in about 1991 but the most recent version is tremendous.

If I can get photoshop and itunes working successfully I'll certainly be switching to Linux as my primary OS!

Reg readers offered discount tickets to internet future

Tom_B

wont this make it worse?

Instead of different people being able to own site.com, site.net, site.org and run different sites on them without treading on each others toes now they've severly reduced the namespace to the point where everyone will want .name and not be happy with anything else.

This'll be fun to watch...

Microsoft's IE 8 'most widely used browser', rules ASA

Tom_B

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Argumentum ad populum. Seems an odd thing for the ASA to look into.

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

Tom_B

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits

I left university 3 years ago with a degree in software engineering.

Frankly, I found the whole of year 1 redundant. Having grown up modding games and creating various programs/websites, spending 6+ lectures on conditional logic was rather pointless. The whole of the first year seemed aimed at people who hadn't touched a computer before let alone people with some amount of programming experience.

Years 2 and 3 were marginally better but I probably increased my overall programming knowledge by 10% at best... and only because I went out of my way to choose a dissertation which stretched my knowledge.

I can see why though it was this way though. There were around 60 students doing computer science courses while i was there. Probably around 75% had little to no programming knowledge prior to the course.

I'd say that the universities probably shouldn't allow people with zero experience on the courses, but they need funding and the few of us who had knowledge of the topic probably wouldn't have been enough to make it financially viable for the university to run the course.

Saying that, I'm sure that a degree in software engineering looks good on my CV even if I would have learned far more sitting at home making stuff for fun.

Microsoft's IE9 'nearly finished'

Tom_B

Re: text-shadow

Yes: http://r.je/css3-in-ie.html

Hacky? Yes. But it means developers can actually use CSS3 instead of waiting for archaic browsers to be updated then for users to actually insall the new versions.

Virgin Media begins 100Mb upgrades

Tom_B
Stop

Throttled

With the 1.5gb cap.. it will take a whole 2 minutes of full usage to get capped down to stupidly low speeds.

iPad tethering does disappearing trick

Tom_B

"people taking the piss."

Taking the piss for thinking they can use as much data they want when they're in a contract for "unlimited" data...

That makes no sense. Either operators need to stop offering "unlimited" packages or they need to actually make them unlimited.

Google punts url shortener to world+dog

Tom_B
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For print...

QR codes are the solution.

I hate shortened URLs. They offer nothing to the end user other than ambiguity about the content they're going to get.

I suppose they're useful on twitter due to the arbitrary character limit. However, this is bug in twitter and should be fixed their end rather than a something which should be activley worked around.

Virgin Media introduces P2P throttling

Tom_B
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What?

Virgin Media's approach seems to be: "You can have an really fast internet connection, provided you don't actually use it for anything that will max it out"

I think that's me gone from VM too.

I already get throttled whenever I buy games on steam. God forbid I buy and want to play games during the evenings when I'm at home and not at midnight like virgin would like.

Let's keep in mind there are several legitimate uses of P2P technology which I use frequently:

-Spotify

-The World Of Warcraft updater, and when the latest update is over 5gb throttling would be annoying.

Anti-piracy lawyers' email database leaked after hack

Tom_B

Privacy implications?

I have to wonder what privacy law says about leaking personal details of people who never wanted you to have them in the first place.

Firefox 4 hits third beta stage, gets touchy-feely with Windows 7

Tom_B

And the shut down

With FF 3.5 onwards closing the browser on my work PC would leave the firefox.exe process running for about 10 minutes consuming 100+ mb of ram (The reason I usually close it anyway!) and not let you open another.

Firefox started off beautifully lightweight and fast.. now it seems incredibly slow especially compared to the likes of Chrome.

Hidden in plain view: Google Music's stealth infrastructure

Tom_B

Amazon?

Isn't this what amazon are doing? And well in my experience.

Microsoft sneaks Firefox add-on into Patch Tuesday update

Tom_B

"Developers who write the software in the first place enable the use of a lot of good software"

But, developing software for windows is a far simpler/more enjoyable task than for the other two major OSes. Linux is dependancy hell and generally forces you to code for a specific WM (kde or gnome) depending on which UI features you want to use.

Apple nowadays forces you to use the dire Objective-C because the C/C++ api (Carbon) is well out of date meaning you cant use any of the shiny new features, which means you cant port a program to mac without re-coding the entire UI in Objective-C. *sigh*

Microsoft win on this one, hands down, they provide a consistent, (mostly) well documented, up to date API and you dont have to worry about dependencies.

Because of this, you can find software for windows that does pretty much anything. Usually for free.

Microsoft picks over Google's Windows exit strategy

Tom_B
WTF?

@jlocke

Windows 7 asks you to create users during the install process. It only defaults to the admin account if you choose to skip this step, so if that's the case on your machine it's your own fault. By default windows does have it right on this point.

Internet Explorer 8 still not mingling well with 2,000 highly-visited sites

Tom_B

RE: All aboard the fail-browser

The problem with that is, if Microsoft stop making IE, we'll end up in a worse situation than we are now. In 2015, IE8 will still have a large market share and be a pain to code for when all the other browsers have moved fully to HTML5.